Unicode display engine.

[Fraser Gordon]

On 21/05/16 09:05, RM wrote:
> I don't know how the Unicode display engine in Livecode 7.0 and 
> upwards works.

LiveCode doesn't include a Unicode display engine - it takes the steam 
of characters, breaks it down into words and then asks the operating 
system's display engine to render those words. This means that the 
ability to shape complex scripts like Devanagari depends on operating 
system support.

>
> But it certainly doesn't seem to want to do some interesting knitting 
> in Hindi:
>
> http://unicode.org/faq/indic.html
>
> Section: "Q: I cannot find the "half forms" of Devanagari letters (or 
> any other Indic script) in the Unicode code charts."
>
> Is this "just me", or is the Livecode unicode engine unable to perform 
> this sort of trick?

I've not tested with Devanagari, but the font shaping supplied by the 
operating system does work for Arabic letters (the ZWJ and ZWNJ 
codepoints cause the shaping to use initial/medial/final forms 
correctly) so maybe the machine you're running on doesn't do Indic 
shaping? Try entering the same characters into a text editor application 
to see if it works (make sure you're using the same font in both the 
editor and LiveCode). If not, let me know as there is something strange 
going on!

Fraser